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The Do-It-Yourself Approach to Tracking Gas Drilling

4:25 p.m. | Addendum on methane leaks added |
Given that government resources for environmental regulation (and just about everything else) will be constrained for a long time to come, I’ve been enthusiastic about efforts by the public to take a D.I.Y. (do it yourself) role in tracking pollution or resource issues, whether on the ground or online.

That’s why I loved learning last year how Jamie Serra, a 26-year-old employee of the state legislature in Pennsylvania, created the useful Web site Fracktrack.org as a way to organize masses of data on drilling permits, violations and other activities related to the natural gas drilling rush in that state.

And it’s also why I was excited today to see a national mapping effort along the same lines created by the organization SkyTruth. The information mapped by SkyTruth mainly comes from data that are voluntarily submitted by gas companies to the FracFocus chemical disclosure registry that I wrote about last year. But a lot more transparency is still needed. For instance, the industry has thousands of water test results from before and after wells were drilled that it does not share with independent scientists.

I asked Serra to weigh in on his Pennsylvania mapping tool and the new national project:

Political ideologies and arguments aside, a new way of approaching solutions to pressing environmental issues is growing out of the fracking movement with the potential to remove rhetoric and cheap political stunts from the policy process…

Although my region has very little gas development in comparison to other parts of the commonwealth, I’ve spent the past five years working for the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee within the commonwealth’s general assembly. This has presented an opportunity to see gas development unfold throughout the state, and to have a firsthand view of the sources of contention and confusion.

This is why I started developing FrackTrack.org, a suite of tools to help landowners and citizens of the commonwealth understand what’s happening around them. After seeing how many people were looking for information that existed but wasn’t made readily available by the government, I decided to start aggregating and publishing Pennsylvania’s gas development data in a format that’s easy to use and understand.

I believe people are capable of deciding what’s in their best interest, so my goal is to make it easy for people to get the information they’re looking for. It’s refreshing to see organizations like SkyTruth engaged in similar activities, because it builds legitimacy for the model. There are a lot of similarities and differences among the various projects that map oil and gas data, and SkyTruth has certainly made a lot of progress over the past few years.

In addition to displaying information the government generates, FrackTrack.org is collecting water well data from landowners and I’ve also created a jobs registry for businesses. The idea is that by providing a system for individuals to verify and submit their information, we’ll help complete missing and inaccurate data sets that are poorly designed and aren’t mandated by existing statutes or regulations. The numbers are no longer worth arguing over when we have the ability to generate and verify millions of responses in real-time. It eliminates bias and enhances transparency, and that’s something that all ends of the political spectrum have a hard time disagreeing with.

There are many other issues that can be tackled in the same way. When people think of technology in considering sustainable human advancement, they usually focus on some new solar panel, battery or water filter. But another such technology, to me, is the Web itself — which is creating unparalleled opportunities to foster transparency and awareness, point out best and worst practices and share and shape ideas.

4:25 p.m.|Addendum

A Twitter comment on methane leakage from gas operations reminded me to add a note about another ripe opportunity for citizens to track gas leaks from drilling operations, compressing stations or pipelines: Raise money for some infrared cameras and then survey your region periodically. As I often say in talks, in communication it’s vital to choose the right tool for the job — in this case that means choosing the right wavelength. See what such emissions look like in this video produced for the Environmental Protection Agency:

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.